20 Random Facts About Sam Winchester
by mimblexwimble
Summary: Sam was an accidental baby.


**20 Random Facts About Sam Winchester**

**1.** Sam is an accidental baby. Mary doesn't realize she's pregnant until she starts dreaming of a pearl bracelet that shines like the Morning Star.

**(a)** When Mary goes into labor, she expects it to be long and drawn out, like Dean's, an endless fourteen hour, but Sam's out in the world in less than five. Mary watches John holding him, tucked close to his chest, watches Sam's tiny baby breaths, and tells the nurse standing nearby that she never expected it to go so fast. The nurse smiles, touches the silken tuft of hair on Sam's head and says, "This baby's gonna show the world."

**2.** Mary reads to her boys every night before bed. When she dies, John takes up the tradition; it's the only comfort he can think to give and to take. He collects children's books, makes funny voices for all the characters and revels in the healing power of Dean's laughter, and Sammy's clapping. He manages to keep it up for two years, before pain and revelation cloud everything else. Dean moves onto other things, but the reading seems to stick with Sam. He adores books like few other things, drinking in the pictures as he sits in the backseat of the Impala, strapped into a car seat.

**3.** Sam starts school late, middle of first grade, but John tells his teacher that he thinks Sam will be fine. Tells her that Sam's a reader. When he returns at the end of the day to pick Sam up, the teacher pulls him aside and asks, "Mr. Winchester, do you know your son can't read?" They move two weeks later, and John doesn't think too much about it.

**(a)** It's not that Sam doesn't want to read, he does. But while other students move from words to sentences, he can't seem to make sense of the letters, likes the pictures better. After they move, he gets Dean to read to him every night, answers every question his teacher asks, reads out sentences learned by rote, and tries to show people he's not stupid. Other students call him names, and even Dean asks why he loves school so much, but it's not so much _loving_ it as it is proving everyone else wrong, and he'd rather be called names for knowing things than not knowing them.

**(b)** When Sam's eight, he reads out a passage at school and realizes he's not parroting the words, he's reading them. He goes home and digs the motel Bible out of its drawer, a book he's never opened before, and reads out one sentences after another, as if he's been able to do it forever.

**4.** When he's twelve, a group of kids corner him behind the middle school where he's waiting for Dean. They grab his book bag and play keep-away, call him "fatso" and "lardass" and "Fatty McGeekBoy" and push him into the mud left behind by last night's rain, and laugh as they run off.

**(a)** When the school lets out for spring break, Sam looks up his BMI, makes a diet/exercise chart that he keeps under his mattress, races with Dean every morning, and asks Dad if he can join his training regimen. It takes him three weeks to lose all of the excess weight and three more to develop some muscle.

**(b)** He never gets called "fatso" again.

**(c)** He never quite gets the hang of eating a full meal again, either.

**5.** When Sam's thirteen, Dean lands in the hospital after a hunt gone bad. The doctor comes out and tells Dad that Dean's heart stopped twice on the table, and Sam blacks out. It's the first time he realizes how much he hates their life.

**(a)** It's also the first time he realizes how much he loves Dean.

**6.** Sam stitches his father and brother up for the first time on his fourteenth birthday, keeps vigil over their bedsides for the entire night, vomits three times into the toilet bowl and has nightmares for a week. When his school starts passing out flyers about college and PSATs and SATs, Sam takes one.

**(a) **He doesn't decide that he wants to leave until goes on his first hunt and cracks a red cap's skull open and watches it writhe and shrivel and die and thinks, _That could be Dad. That could be Dean. That could be me_.

**(b) **He feels like a coward, applying to colleges, knows that he's leaving because he can't take the fear any longer, the idea that the one thing standing between his family and death could be him, and wonders what Dean and Dad would think of him if they knew.

**(c) **Dad brings in his acceptance letters when they arrive, tosses them on the table and says, "Don't know why you wasted the time, kiddo, when you're not going to go."

**(d) **Sam knows that they're mad, even though he can't understand it. He doesn't realize how mad until Dad tells him never to come back. He stands at the bus stop and realizes he's lost his family and if he told you that he didn't cry on the ride to Palo Alto, he'd be lying.

**7. **Sam has no friends throughout his freshman and sophomore years at Stanford. He finds solace in books.

**(a) **He meets Jessica Moore in his Politics class, where they get into a heated argument over the Middle East and she calls him an ignoramus.

**(b) **He pretty much decides right there that she's a flake.

**(c) **Six months later she finds his dorm room and hands him a rose and tells him she feels like an ass and asks him out for coffee.

**8. **His first prayer is uttered in a friend's car during a traffic jam. Someone's black T-bird is folded in half against a tree, and he's filled with a sudden urge to call Dean and ask him if he's all right, but he can't and doesn't, just thinks, _Please God, protect them_.

**9. **College, like school, isn't easy for Sam. He can't scrape decent grades without even trying like Dean always seemed to. He spends hours on every paper, stays awake for three days straight during mid-terms and finals. It's only his determination that gets him where he wants to be. It's always his determination that gets him where he wants to be.

**10. **In his junior year, he's walking in between the shelves of the library and overhears a group of guys he knows talking about him. "I mean, does anyone even know him?" one says. "Where he came from, his family – he's a complete mystery. Either he's really shy or really snobby." "Or a serial killer," mutters someone else. Sam stands between those shelves for a long time, and thinks, these people _should _know him. This is who he wants to be. This is who he is. He wonders if anyone really knows him, or if he even knows himself, and if he wants what he thinks he wants, and if Sam Winchester really exists at all.

**11. **A part of him thinks that his anger after Jess's death will keep the fear at bay, until he finds Dean pale as death in a basement in Montana. He prays constantly until the ambulance arrives, and paces around the hospital, talks to the staff, fills papers and gives a statement to delay the moment he'll have to hear that this time, Dean didn't make it. Instead, he walks into Dean's room to find a shadow of the man he knows as his brother. This Dean, who tells him that it's over, no point in avoiding the obvious, terrifies him more than a bleeding out, hallucinating, feverish Dean ever could.

**12. **Sam thinks his first memory is of his mother, jostling him up and down on her knee while Dean plays with a set of blocks across the room, but he can't be sure. There are so many things he doesn't know, about his parents and his brother, things that only come to light when Dean shares them, and it's unsettling. He doesn't know how many of his memories of _then_ are actually his, and how many are projections of the few stories Dean's told.

**13. **"It's so hard to do this, what we do," says Sam to Dean in a small church town and he's never been more honest with anyone in his life. Everything he does seems hard. The rewards are rarely ever worth it.

**14. **Death surrounds Sam like a cloak, until he thinks he is cursed, until he thinks that everyone he's ever loved is going to die. He keeps a stranglehold on hope after Dean's deal, because Dean, he's loved the most, Dean has been around the longest, Sam's _saved_ Dean, time and time again, and there's no way, _no way_ Dean is going die.

**(a) **Sam doesn't know what insanity feels like, but a long time after they leave Broward County, Florida, he lies awake in bed and listens to Dean breathe and thinks he might've lost his mind in the Trickster's world. He doesn't know how to go back to the Sam of six months ago. He doesn't know how to readjust.

**15. **Sam cries a total of three times after Dean dies. First, while driving to Indiana, Dean's body wrapped in white sheets in the backseat. He loses it as soon as he turns on his blinkers, heads for the exit, has to pull over to avoid crashing. Second, while digging the grave, after clearing as many trees as he can, with splinters in his hands and an unbearable ache in his shoulder, a body lying three feet away. Third, after sex with Ruby, when she leaves the ramshackle apartment for wherever she stays, leaving him an empty room and mountains of shock and guilt and all he can think is, _What did I do? What did I do? _He cries himself to sleep, the strongest emotion he's felt in days.

**16. **Sam's happiest memory is of a day in June, when he was twelve and Dad drove them to a lake and taught them to fish. Dean threw worms at him, and Sam couldn't bear the thought of keeping the fish he caught, and Dad cut himself on the fishing line, but it's the best Sam's got, and it's the best he's ever felt.

**(a) **Sam sometimes tries to think of his worst memory, but he has a hard time choosing just one, and stops before he gets too far and brings back all the pain that he's shoved into the far corners of his mind.

**17. **Going after Lilith was never an intention until Ruby brought it up, and Sam agrees to it because it's easier, and hell, if Lilith dies, it's just two birds with one stone. He can't put a gun to his mouth and pull the trigger, but this, he can do.

**(a) **But Ruby's plan isn't about immediate gratification, and the longer Sam practices the more he thinks that maybe, _maybe_, if he can control this curse, he can turn it into a gift. It always comes back to hope, he realizes, in his most introspective moments. It always comes back to hope. He doesn't know why he seems to have an endless supply. He wishes he could just _stop_.

**18. **"You've been using your psychic crap and you've been getting stronger! We just don't know why and we don't know how," Dean says in a motel room in Maryland. It hits Sam then that this is as close as Dean is going to get to aligning himself with heaven, saying "we", making Castiel a _partner_, someone on _his_ side. He thinks about Ruby, and how, when Sam talks about her and him he might sometimes say "we" but mostly he just says "I" and he only ever thinks "I". He thinks about when "we" used to mean them, Sam and Dean, and wonders when that stopped. Wonders how he didn't even notice it. Wonders why something so precious was lost so easily. He's never felt quite so alone.

**19. **There is never any part of Sam that thinks what he's doing might not be right. He hides behind his family and the Apocalypse, yes, but if he can stop the world ending, does it matter that the only thing he wants is to see Lilith dead, to see if watching the light fade in her eyes will make him feel alive again?

**20. **But when it's finally over and done for, everything starts crumbling around him. He feels like he's sleeping walking as Dean drags him out of the convent and into the open air, and all he can think is, _What now? What now?_ and all he can feel is the weight of his every failure, and all he can hear is the thrum of the car around him. Nothing now. Nothing.


End file.
